A conventional database-driven system may include several computing environments, each consisting of one or more applications and a database instance storing data associated with the one or more applications. Such a system may provide online transaction processing for several different vendors. For example, each computing environment may store data specific to a particular vendor and may be responsible for processing online transactions on behalf of the vendor.
A system as described above typically stores a significant amount of identical data across each database instance. This data may comprise static data unrelated to any specific vendor, such as payment processing data, shipping data, etc. Duplicative storage of this data is inefficient, particularly if this duplication is not intended for backup or redundancy. Moreover, the entire portion of static data must be recreated each time an additional environment is required (e.g., to support an additional vendor).
Systems are therefore desired to provide one or more database instances with efficient access to a common set of data objects.